


until only the mountain remains

by strikinglight



Category: Persona 4, Persona Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/F, M/M, Mountains, Spirits, Walks In The Woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5436782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Prince—Yosuke—was also one of the few who did not fear the mountain that cast its shadow over their village, who did not lower his eyes and drop his voice to a low and reverent whisper when he spoke of it. It appeared in his dreams, he said, night after night. One day he would climb it, he said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	until only the mountain remains

**Author's Note:**

> So I was joking with [Susie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/pseuds/goukyorin) about Souyo fantasy AU things. And then it suddenly... was not a joke anymore. I'm so sorry.

This must be the third or the fourth night he has spent on the mountain. He has noticed the air thinning as he climbs and compensates by breathing faster, deeper, bunching the folds of his cloak up over his nose and mouth to keep the cold out of his lungs. He isn’t tired, not really, though he began his ascent at first light and has stopped only briefly since then; he tells himself that it feels good to keep moving, and that it’s the walking that sets his blood flowing, keeps his body warm and supple.

He eats as he walks, chewing slowly and thoughtfully on the balls of rice and the pieces of dried fish he keeps in the bundle slung across his back. It feels good to keep moving. It does not matter how slowly. He repeats this to himself many times, silently, like a prayer, like the names of his father and his mother and his brother, and he keeps his eyes on the moon.

On the lower slopes he heard birds calling to one another, heard the padding and rustling of hare or fox in the undergrowth, once even glimpsed the faint outline of a deer, but at these heights all is silent around him. Sometimes the silence thickens, shifts, and he almost imagines that there is something alive behind the air prickling against the back of his neck, though when he turns he finds himself as alone as ever. He thinks about the demons that his mother and father spoke of, things he and his brother had been taught to fear in their childhood—oni that feasted on the flesh of children, imps that dropped down from the trees onto the backs of travelers, ghosts singing strange, sad songs in the night, beckoning listeners into forests and off the edges of cliffs.

The moon shines down at him between the arms of the trees, the only bright thing in this forest of shadows, and so long as he walks in its light he is almost warm.

 

* * *

 

In his village, they called him the Prince, for he was the elder son of a family of merchants that had once lived in the capital, but had left the city a year or two ago to move to the countryside. The possible reason behind this move was the subject of ferocious gossip for perhaps half of the first year. A scandal, some rumormongers said. Or a failing business, said the women at market, or simply the vicissitudes of city life. Whatever the truth may have been, in the midst of all these stories, the family came, and settled, and the bright threads of summer ran seamlessly into autumn, into winter. In that time the old man and his wife and their two sons—who at this point had come to be called the Prince and the Little Prince—built a simple home, opened a simple shop, and in so doing stitched themselves into the fabric of the town like they had always been there.

The Prince made a living by helping his father run the shop, and he soon came to be known for his uncanny ability to magic anything into a bargain with his words—packets of herbs, foreign spices, whetstones, razors, bolts of cloth. Word on the street was there was nothing the Prince couldn’t sell, with the exception of only two things. The first was his birth name, Yosuke, which he traded out to anyone he spoke to in exchange for their friendship. The second was his smile, which shone so warmly out of his face it seemed almost as if he carried the spring sun inside him. That he gave away for free.

The Prince—Yosuke—was also one of the few who did not fear the mountain that cast its shadow over their village, who did not lower his eyes and drop his voice to a low and reverent whisper when he spoke of it. It appeared in his dreams, he said, night after night. One day he would climb it, he said.

At this the villagers shook their heads and made the sign against evil with their hands. Did he not know about the shadows that crept between the trees, the terrible twisting paths, the unseen cliffs? No one who set out for the mountain, in search of game or treasure or simply the source of the voice that seemed to be calling down to them from the heights, ever returned. A boy from the city could not possibly understand.

 

* * *

 

There are no maps of the mountain, no beaten path even to show him the way to go. He does not think about this as he continues forward. He knows where he is going. He has dreamed this walk a hundred times, and his feet take him where they want to as though bespelled, and when he grows weary he sits against a tree, closes his eyes, and imagines. The clarity of the images that appear behind his closed eyes is so startling it is tempting not to trust them, but the mountain has taught him to simply let his mind do what it knows. Some hundred paces forward, his imagination dictates, he will come to a stream, and the water will be clear and sweet enough to drink. He will drink, refill his waterskin, and wash his face and hands of the dirt and the grit of the climb. Then he will continue.

It’s these two things that lead him—the light of the moon, and the sound of water.

 

* * *

 

Many nights and many dreams passed, until Yosuke woke one morning with the call echoing in his ears and tugging incessantly at his heart, and knew.

The day he decided he would finally attempt the climb, Yosuke went to tell his closest friend, the blacksmith’s apprentice, and to ask her for a weapon that he might take with him for his protection. The girl fixed him with her fierce eyes as he spoke, and after he had finished speaking said nothing for a long while. She picked up the hammer that lay across her anvil, testing the heft of it in her hand. Her bare arms were streaked with soot from the forge.

 _What you need,_ she told him at last, _is an army. Or something else to love._

Yosuke rolled his eyes at her, and asked where, pray tell, would he find an army in a village of less than a hundred people? He was no true prince, after all, and this had nothing to do with love. She was being silly, he said, but not unkindly. The blacksmith’s girl was one of those who _was_ afraid of the mountain—armored though she was by her fierceness, her fire-forged strength of will, she was in truth soft-hearted, and afraid of many things—and she was perhaps doubly afraid for him, because he was her friend.

When he said _I have to go,_ she sighed and made no further attempt to dissuade him. She recognized the urgency in his words, and she knew that it would not be kind to hold her fear or her friendship over his head until he relented. Instead, she unbuckled two knives from her own belt—a pair of sturdy, lightweight hunting daggers with bone handles and blades of tempered steel—and offered them to him. The price, she said, was his safe return, and a few cups of wine.

 _Say a prayer at the shrine before you go,_ she said as she walked with him to the door of the smithy. _Look for the priestess_ _there, and ask her for a charm. And a little wisdom to guide your way, perhaps._

He smiled then at the blacksmith’s girl, because this was not the first time he had heard her speak of the priestess this way, with the sharp edge of longing in her voice. He had seen her eyes stray wistfully more than once when they ought to have been closed in prayer, on the first day of the New Year, and on the Day of the Dead.

 _If you give me a coin,_ he teased, _I can say a prayer for you too._

It was only a little later, when he had turned his back on her and started to make his way down the street, that he began to wonder—was that also how he sounded, how he looked, when he spoke of the mountain?

 

* * *

 

His food has long since run out, and the last drops of his water leak out of his waterskin and onto his tongue with excruciating slowness. He pulls his cloak tighter around him. There is nowhere to go but forward, and if he can ignore the cold and the dark for a few more hours, perhaps it will not be long before he finally comes upon whatever it was the gods had meant for him to find by calling him here, and when he finds it his strength will be restored.

He walks and walks, pauses to lean against the tree and draw in a long breath—it rattles and flutters around the inside of his chest, panicked, beating its wings—and walks.

He stumbles, going down onto one knee on the ground. He pushes himself to his feet. This, too, is part of what he has seen in his dreams.

And just when he finds his strength flagging, just when he thinks it is tempting to sit down for a moment—just a moment—and close his eyes and think of nothing at all, something unnameable quickens inside him, and almost as if his coming here had been foretold, the ground rises, flattens under his feet. The black shapes of the trees recede and fall away from him, and he sees it: the beautiful fall of water pouring as if by magic from the mountainside, the pool at its base shimmering, burning like a spiral of stars. And in the center of it, a young man, a boy, his back turned to Yosuke, wading waist-deep.

 _Boy_ is the first thing Yosuke thinks, by instinct, but there is something strange about him that makes Yosuke pause. Something not quite human about the grace with which he moves through the water, about the way the ripples eddy out around him like they’re alive. Something otherworldly about the body, the skin too white, the hair silver as the moonlight melting down into the surface of the pool. He turns too slowly, head cocked in expectation as he faces Yosuke, entirely unruffled by the chill and by his nakedness both.

Yosuke stares, struggling to take stock of what he sees. None of what he’s heard or imagined feels like adequate preparation.

 

* * *

 

As Yosuke stood before the shrine he remembered the capital and its towering temples, with their elaborately carved pillars and their arches reaching upward to claw at the sky, and thought there was no such comfort to be found there as here, in this small building of wood and bamboo, this house of small gods. But here, as there, the movements were the same. Toss the coins into the offertory box, ring the bell to call the gods. Bow, pray, clap your hands, bow, the same ritual motions he had been repeating since he was old enough to walk.

That day Yosuke reached into his sleeve and drew out two coins, and said two prayers—one for the heart of the blacksmith’s girl, and one for his own heart, which seemed to be winging ahead of him up into the heights, the shape of it against the sky growing smaller by the hour.

When he opened his eyes the priestess was there, as though she had known he would call for her when he finished with her gods. She said nothing at first, merely inclined her head politely toward him and waited for him to speak, and he in turn stumbled and stammered over the threads of his own story. The priestess was young, as young as he was, and very beautiful—fair and slender, with a graceful mouth and hair smooth and dark as the surface of the deepest lake. Yosuke remembered lamenting this loudly with the other young men of the village on more than one occasion, as no one could touch what had been given to the gods. He thought of his friend the blacksmith’s girl, and where her eyes went when they wandered.

 _I have to go,_ he told her.

She looked into his eyes, then at the knives in his belt—and here he thought he saw the cool ivory mask of her face soften the smallest bit, but he could have imagined it—and agreed, _It is calling you._ Then she drew an amulet from her own sleeve and pressed it into his hand, and instructed him to sew it into the chest of his tunic, so that he could neither lose it nor have it taken from him.

 _Whatever you meet on the mountain,_ she said, _do not tell it your name. Do not touch it._

Before he left the shrine the priestess reached out and laid her fingertips against his forehead, murmuring a few words of blessing. Yosuke wondered for a moment at the warmth of her hand, at the fires that seemed to burn quietly beneath the skin. He bowed low to her in gratitude and returned to his house.

 

* * *

 

They face each other across the water, silently, and an eternity passes between them. One hand strays to the daggers hanging at his hip, and the boy’s gaze follows it—the shifting of his eyes and the slight downward movement of his head are slow, almost languid, but the gaze itself is sharp, quicker than the naked blade would have been, even in Yosuke’s hand.

 _Do not be afraid,_ the boy says, and the words seem to ripple out of him and flicker for a moment in the air before they disappear. _I will not sing you off the mountainside, or pull you under the water to be drowned, or tear out your heart with my bare hands and eat it._

Yosuke says nothing. The boy’s lips curl a little, the expression entirely without malice, only curious and quiet and amused. _We hear the stories you humans spin about us, you know._

Yosuke presses his lips together and says nothing. They continue to contemplate each other, the boy’s gaze leveled, unwavering, on Yosuke’s face, and Yosuke stares back, wary and perplexed but unable to tear his eyes away.

 _You_ are _human, yes?_ The boy, the spirit, the fey creature, looks puzzled now too, his brow wrinkling gently under the fall of his bright hair. _Do you have a voice?_

 _Yes,_ Yosuke says, before thinking better of it. It almost feels as if the word has been squeezed out of him—it sounds breathy in his own ears, shrill.

 _Your voice sounds like the wind,_ the boy says, and his smile widens, warms. _You should speak more._

 

* * *

 

That night, while waiting for the moon to rise and for his mother and father to put out their lamps, Yosuke gathered his things, and made ready to say goodbye to his brother.

He did not take much, only some rice and some dried fish for the road, a waterskin, two fishing hooks, a spool of thread, sewing needles, flint and steel. His brother helped him pack them into a wrapping cloth, saying nothing. Where on a normal evening he would have laughed and chattered and smothered Yosuke with questions, tonight his mouth made a strange, tight slash line in his face. He did not look at Yosuke as he tied the knots in the cloth, twisted the fabric into a loop that could be passed over an arm or slung across a shoulder. Even when he stood, reached into the woven basket where they kept their clothes, and pushed his best cloak into Yosuke’s hands, he did not raise his eyes from the floor.

It was a good cloak, thick and warm and woven from new wool, dyed in the shifting, muted greens and browns of the forest. It had been a gift from their mother on his last naming-day, and he was prouder of it than of anything else he owned.

 _Thank you,_ Yosuke told him, taking the balled-up cloak and holding it close to his chest like a blessing. His brother answered, _Return it to me when you come home._ His voice was rough, almost harsh. Yosuke thought he did not sound like himself.

They had both known for many months that this night would come. They had spoken about it many times before going to sleep, their furtive whispers muffled even further by pillows and thick quilts. Many times too Yosuke had crawled across the floor to shake his brother awake in the dead of night or the soft dove-grey stillness of the early morning, urgently, eager to tell him what he had dreamed.

Still, Yosuke’s brother was younger and softer than he was. He trembled when Yosuke embraced him, his eyes bright with tears. He did not like to sleep alone, and they had shared every room they had lived in since they were babies.

 _I have to go,_ Yosuke said, firmly, holding his brother’s face in his hands. _Be brave, and keep the house. You are nearly a grown man._

 _I will come home,_ he said, _as soon as I can._ Then he kissed his brother on the forehead, set the cloak around his shoulders, and departed.

 

* * *

 

 _What is your name?_ the boy asks him.

The points on his forehead where the priestess’ fingers touched him burn. Her charm, too, seems to heat up where it rests against his chest, above the heart. _Yosuke,_ he says, before he can stop himself.

 _Yo-su-ke._ The boy appears to be rolling the syllables gently around the inside of his mouth. Tasting them, savoring. Delight blooms on his face, and Yosuke looks away. The stories he hears from his mother and father, from the folk of the village, tell him that the spirits can make themselves beautiful if they so choose, so beautiful no human can bear to look upon them for too long. He was always intrigued by the notion, always wanted to discern the truth of it for himself, but he sees now what the stories might mean—about dying, about pain—in the boy’s face.

_You are very beautiful, Yosuke._

_You are lying,_ Yosuke says, when he means to say, _It’s you who are beautiful._ And the boy laughs—such a long, sweet laugh that Yosuke wishes he could block his ears against the sound, because he is sure he will never forget it now—and shakes his head: _We do not lie._

 

* * *

 

 

In some of Yosuke’s dreams, he looked into the boy’s eyes, and whatever he saw there made him shed his pack and his brother’s cloak and the priestess’ charm and the daggers from the blacksmith’s girl. He left them all in a heap on the ground, all that belonged to him in this world, and walked into the pool, and the boy opened his arms and embraced him. In those dreams the boy’s arms held him fast as they leaned back and sank together. The last thing Yosuke remembered seeing was the glow of the moon up through the water, burning icy and white and bright as the boy’s smile.

In some of Yosuke’s dreams, the boy walked out of the water, took Yosuke’s face in his hands, and kissed him. His lips were wet from the pool, and the kiss was long and slow and snatched away all of Yosuke’s breath, liquid moonlight pouring coldly out of the boy’s mouth and into his lungs.

In some of Yosuke’s dreams, the boy beckoned with a crooked finger, and Yosuke came forward to kneel on one of the flat stones that circled the spring, brought himself low enough to be able to look into the boy’s eyes. In turn, the boy reached out and took his hand, and traced the mountain into Yosuke’s palm with a fingertip.

_If you want to find me, walk up, toward the moon._

The boy curled the hand he held into a fist as if to seal what he had drawn, and pressed it to his lips. Yosuke felt the shape of the boy’s mouth—like the shape of the mountain—etch itself into his skin. He felt his skin turn to ice where the boy had touched him.

_I hope you will come find me, one day._

 

* * *

 

_Why did you call me?_

In a movement so quick he nearly misses it, the boy’s shoulders rise and fall, a small motion Yosuke takes for a shrug. _The mountain called, and you came._

Yosuke thinks that at any moment, his dreams will—finally, finally—release their grip on him and he will summon the strength at last to tear himself away, run at full tilt down the mountainside back toward the village, where his brother waits with a candle set in the window of their house. But for now he is frozen, standing here close to the top of the mountain and listening to a ghost-boy speak to him. This feels more like a dream than anything, the stillness of the woods and the crystalline sound of the spring bubbling, but nothing is more cut out of the stuff of dreams than _him_ —his voice, the moonlight threaded through the locks of his hair. The smile, the brilliant one that brightens his entire face. That he is real, and _here._

 _Is that all?_ Yosuke asks, when in truth he wants to tell the boy that he’s dreamed of this. He wants to say it aloud, even if he sees the strange light in the boy’s eyes and infers that he already knows. He wants to ask what it means, even if there is no answer, or no words for the answer in any human language.

 _It is everything,_ the boy tells him; Yosuke breathes in, and feels his heart fill with ice.


End file.
